When YVONNE SUHOR went to audition for the part of Lou McCloud in The Young Riders -- an orphan girl posing as a boy to become a Pony Express rider -- she pinned her black hair back, wiped off every speck of make-up and wore her scruffiest denims. She was so convincing as a short, slight, rough-edged male that she almost lost the part.

"The hang-up, I found out later, was that an MGM executive started to worry that I might not be attractive enough when it came time for Lou (Louise) to put on a dress and have a little romance," Suhor says, laughing. "I took it as a compliment to my acting rather than as an insult to my femininity. A screen test where I walk into a dress shop in leather and walk out in a dress convinced the producers that I could play a pretty girl, too."

They key to playing a young man of 18 "is to keep your voice low and head down," says Suhor, who is 26. At 5 foot 3 inches and 100 pounds, she uses a floppy hat, an athletic bra (which is like a giant rubber band) and a shirt buttoned to the throat under a leather vest to complete the transformation.

"I did a lot of research for the part and found a lot of data on a petite woman from New Orleans who went under the name Mountain Charlie," Suhor says. Mountain Charlie set out to avenge her husband' murder, disguising herself as a 16-year-old boy. "Among other things, she worked on a stagecoach line and as a trail scout for a wagon train. It's obvious that lots of women were doing what Lou is doing."

Suhor gets a lot of fan mail, mostly from the young girls who also write love letters to the male stars of the series -- including TY MILLER, GREGG RAINWATER and JOSH BROLIN. "But they write me for a different reason," she says, smiling. "They see me as a role model type, a woman who doesn't accept the status quo and takes it upon herself to change the situation." A lot of them like having "an alternative to the other women in television who seem to be there only to make a fashion statement," Suhor says.

She also gets letters from grown men. "Some are love letters from people who think I'm the perfect woman -- tough and beautiful," Suhor says, rolling her eyes. "I know what I look like most of the time on the show, so when they tell me I'm beautiful I usually don't write them back, because I think there's something wrong with them."

Suhor says she sometimes has to work to maintain her femininity off-camera while on location around Tuczon, Arizona. There is only one other female regular in the cast, MELISSA LEO (who plays Emma Shannon) and the production crew is 90 percent male. "It's like it would be for a man to spend eight months, 21 hours a day, in a maternity ward with all female doctors," she says with a sigh. "I always bring to the set a book written by a good female writer, like Anais Nin, so I won't feel like I'm all alone in the world."

Suhor shed the tomboy image recently to make Dillinger, a telemovie shown on ABC. She plays Jackie Pierpont, a sexy, flashy gun moll; Mark Harmon has the title part. "There was never any doubt in the casting director's mind about me playing a sexy woman running around in heavy make-up and lacy lingerie, thank God," she says.

Working with Harmon, it didn't take long for Suhor to rediscover her feminine instincts. "In fact, I found the bra that I had to wear in the love scene a bit silly and adolescent, but it was a lot of fun taking my clothes off and going to bed with Mark Harmon. We did things that might not show up on TV in this country," she says.

"Anyway, things came naturally once the camera rolled. Playing this androgynous character Lou, on the other hand, has always been strange to me." Raised with six sisters, she finds herself "very comfortable around real women."

Suhor, who also has four brothers, was born in New Orleans and raised mainly in Champaign, Ill. After her parents' divorce, she and several of her siblings stayed with her father, a school administrator. The rest of the divided brood lived with their mother in Tallahassee, Fla. "What I remember best of the occasional Christmases we spent together was lots of noise," she says. "We grew up with nothing, so the worst present in the world evoked a scream of joy. Multiply that 11 times and you get the idea."

After graduation from Champaign's Central High School, where she was active in campus drama, Suhor entered the local Parkland Junior College with every intention of becoming a teacher. While working on a psychology minor, she became interested in psycho-drama and drifted into directing. When it was time to move on to Illinois State University, only acting scholarships were available.

"I had to start acting to support my directing addiction," she says. Suhor graduated with honors in acting and directing in 1986 and spent the next year working on a master's degree in English. Spotted in a campus stage play by members of Chicago's Steppenwolf theater troupe, she spent late 1987 and early 1988 touring Australia with the company.

She found Australia a freeing experience. "I'm terribly shy and not much of an adventurer," she says. But she "discovered the topless beaches everywhere," she says with a blush, and "it was an amazing experience for me to run around with hardly anything on. I felt like a 5-year-old... again."

Back in Chicago, Suhor became a member of the Immediate theater Ensemble and continued her work with Steppenwolf in a critically acclaimed version of The Grapes of Wrath that has since gone to Broadway. By the time she signed up for an ABC talent-development program and moved to Los Angeles in early 1989, Suhor also had appeared in several productions for the Body Politic Theater.

"I made my screen debut while in college, as one of about 30 background dancers in Patrick Swayze's Grandview USA," Suhor says. She also appeared in an episode of a midseason replacement series called Sable while doing theater in Chicago. "ABC initially thought I'd be right as a young reporter in Capital News or a DA on Equal Justice, but I got a job on my second audition -- The Young Riders.

Single and "a romantic transient," Suhor divides her time between a Tucson apartment and a rented home in LA. "I'm living with a guy, but we sort of dissolved the partnership recently," she says with a touch of sadness. "He's young and its hard for him to have a girlfriend living out of town most of the year. He likes to be left alone and I shouldn't talk about him."

Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer TV Week, August 19, 1990